How to Make Your Website Google friendly?

Photo by Caio.

I assume your website is ready. And now what you need to do is fine-tune your content, to make your website Google friendly. Let us talk about how to prepare your website for Google Search Engine. This is important. And I, can’t emphasize enough how important it is for a website. So let’s learn how to make your website Google friendly.

For example, you have a website, but no visitors. What good is that? It would be like a shop with no customers. Why no customers? Because no one knows about your store. This is the preliminary hurdle every business and website faces, at a startup.

What next? What do we do? Do we promote? Certainly, it would need some capital. I have already mentioned in one of my articles, that every business needs time, effort, and capital. For this article let’s not talk about expenditures. We are going to discuss, how to prepare for the big game.

If you have capital, it takes no time to spin some ads. What you have to think about, “Is your website ready for running Ads“? If you have launched your website yesterday or a month ago, the answer is “No“. No, your site is not ready to run ads.

Organic Growth

Let there be no confusion. You can always run ads. You pay money, put in some text and images, and Google or Facebook will run your Ads.
But,

• Will that help you in the long run?
• Is it a good approach to Organic Growth?

Again, the answer is ‘No’. This is not the way.

When I say Organic Growth, I mean to grow in a natural way.

You planted a seed. Let it germinate. Nurture it. Water it daily. Show it some sunshine. Add some soil nutrition. Check for pesticides. In short, take good care of it. Then one fine day, you will see your plant has grown and is fruiting. In any business or even a website, the same principle follows, inspired by nature. Go slow, but be steady. Plan and prepare your website for Google and other search engines.

You can not create a website, which will give you millions in a few weeks. Stay away from fake claims.

The best approach for Organic Growth is to prepare your website for Search Engines. Search Engines like Google. I will refer to Google as a search engine, as it has a 90% of the market share. If your website ranks in Google, we assume we are covering a majority of your potential customers. This would be good enough to start.

The organic way to grow your website is to deliver good and meaningful content. Keep it updated and keep it flowing. The content must be in-lined with your product or services. A Sports Shoe website talking about Cosmic Science doesn’t make sense. A Bakery website talking about Caster Sugar makes perfect harmony.

The all-mighty Google.

Believe it or not, Google is the third best thing in our today’s day-to-day life. The first two are Electricity and the Internet. Information, image, video, or even map location. Google knows it all.

Google, or any other search engine’s, primary goal is to deliver the best match search results. The results are most appropriate against the search term. For that, Google has some automatic programs called Bots. These bots read your website content and analyze it. The result of this analysis is what ranks your website. The higher the rank, the better are your chances that Google displays your website page title. By the way, the lower the rank number is, the higher the rank. So, rank 10 is higher than rank 40.

In simple terms, these Bots crawl your web page and collect text & links from your web pages. After data collection, it will compare your content against the keywords. As per the comparison and analysis, your web page gets tagged as a good or a bad page.

Now, what should we do, to make our website Google friendly and list it in Google search results? To answer that, I would like to quote:

Elementary, my dear Watson.

Sherlock Holmes

We need to follow the best practices guidelines, defined by Google.
Here are some key points:

• Mobile-friendliness
• Meta tags and targeted keywords
• Your content is in context with your targeted keywords
• Easy to read
• Well structured documentation
• Many more

If you follow these instructions from Google, it will consider your content as a good quality, and eventually rank you up in their search result page.

In technical terms, this process is also known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and each of these is itself a long topic for discussion. Let me address each topic in brief. Be aware of the fact, that these Bots are intelligent enough to figure out any malpractices. If you do not grow your website in an organic manner, you might end up doing unintentional harm to your website.

Prepare your website

Mobile-friendliness

This means, your website must not spill display on a mobile or any other hand-held device. The design of your website must adjust by itself to the display of the device. Devices like iPhone, Android, Blackberry, iPads & other tablets. This automatic display change is also known as Responsive Web Design. These designs will respond to any device or display. Be it your cell phone, tab, laptop, or desktop PC. This gives your user a level of comfort while viewing your website.

Keep in mind, that these days, more than 80% of your viewers will be accessing your website through mobile. And that is why Google takes it as a key point. If your website is not responsive, it won’t tag your website as a good website.

There are various ways to achieve it, but I would like to highlight the two most common ways.

First, if your website is custom-built, try to adapt Bootstrap. This JQuery and CSS-powered architecture harness the power of HTML5. Together it provides a solid foundation for your responsive website design.

Second, if you are using WordPress, it is much more simple. Choose a responsive or Bootstrap-based theme. You can search or filter it on the WordPress Theme selection page. Likewise, you don’t have to bother at all about the design architecture. Someone else has already done it for you.

Meta tags and targeted keywords

In HTML, there are two major tags that go under the header tag. Keyword and Description tag. Identify your target keywords. After identifying keywords, use the EdWordle app to visualize your word cloud. Check if your primary keyword is blooming in your garden of content.

Make sure your keyword & description HTML meta-tags contain those keywords and key phrases.

<head>  
<meta name="keywords" content="my targeted keywords & key phrases">
<meta name="description" content="This will display in search results. So put a nice description of this particular page.">
</head>

If you are using custom HTML, you have to mention these two meta-tags inside your head-tag. In case you are using WordPress, you have to update the header file, adding or replacing these two tags.

Content in context with targeted keywords

Content is everything. Without proper content you are invisible. Identify your keywords as per your niche. Wrap your content around it and focus on it. Be direct and straight. If your website content is about a cake recipe, your primary keyword is “Cake Recipe”. So, you need to mention it in your content headings and paragraphs. But don’t over-crowd it.

Try not to add too much background. Avoid talking about anything else, which is not associated with the topic. Try to address the triple-Ws, What, Where, and When?

Illuminate your customers by highlighting your Unique Selling Points (USP). Make your content educational. This will add value to the customer through your content.

Easy to read

Use free tools like the Hemingway App to analyze your text content. Keep your target to Grades 5-6 or below. Here Grade doesn’t mean that your content is for primary-grade students. What it means, is that even kids are able to read your content. This makes your content readable. If your content is hard to read, people lose interest and tend to skip reading. So to keep your visitors engaged you must keep your content easy to read.
Some key points to remember:

• Say direct and avoid adverbs.
• Use active instead of passive voice.
• Choose simple words.
• Keep your sentences smaller.
• So should be your paragraphs. Smaller, the better.

Well structured documentation

Writing good content is important, and so is structuring its collection. Plan a way to structure the document and other documents.

Remember, not only do the visitors read your web page, Bots will read it too. The Bots will crawl the web page (document) for meaningful text and will find links to other web pages. And, from those links, the Bots will crawl further. So if a particular content is not linked with anything else, crawling stops.

So plan a list of content that you will be starting with. Or whatever you have composed till now. Then, wear your thinking cap, and have a close look. Are those web page contents, connected with each other? It is not necessary, or say is impossible, to connect every content page with each other. But, there should be a meaningful connection within some.
For example, let’s take the baker’s web page again.

Say, one of your web pages is talking about “Icing of the Cake“. Among other readers, there could also be a first-time visitor who wants to learn to bake the base cake. So you can have one statement in your “Icing” content, where you can mention a link to the page for “Base Cake“. Makes sense?

Summary

There are various other ways to keep your website healthy, make it Google friendly, and do more to prepare your website for Google. Search Engine Optimization is itself a field of vast study. Whatever I mentioned above are basics and will help you ta lay the foundation of a great website.

If you follow all these basic steps, you have to create your website sitemap. This map contains all the links to your web pages. Then you have to submit it to Google Search Console. Google Bots takes a few days or sometimes weeks, to honor your request. And then your website starts listing in Google searches. That time you may consider running Ads, not before that.

As I mentioned, this is all about laying your foundation stone and preparing your website for Google. There are many miles to go. So be patient and take small steps, and go organic. Don’t rush.

If you do not have a website, and planning to do so, check out my article on Creating your Website. You will be glad to know, how easy it is to launch your website, in no time. If you have a low budget to start, don’t worry. Your search for Best Budget Web Hosting ends here.

Do let me know if you liked this article. If you have queries, please feel free to write to me. It would be a pleasure to address them.

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